Air(Brush) Apparent

The other day, in the midst of a meeting of my paper’s editorial staff, I found myself waving my Feminist card in a manner reminiscent of when I used to referee kids’ soccer games, and had to deploy the whistle-yellow-card combo. (More often than not, the recipients of said cards were not kids at all, […]

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The War Against Women is a War Against Everyone

That gagging sound you heard last week, when Ann Romney bellowed in her best Oprah voice, “I love you, womennnnnn!”? That was me. And not because I don’t love women; I do. And not because I don’t believe that Ann Romney loves women; I’m sure she does. It’s because, at best, this sentiment is utterly […]

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Just Like Us

In an epic case of What-Goes-Around-Comes-Around, Janice Min, founding editor of Us Weekly magazine (a magazine which traffics in “cute mum and baby” porn and is nearly singlehandedly responsible for introducing terms including “baby bump” and “post-baby body” into the lexicon) who helmed the junkreading juggernaut for six years and now collects her paychecks from the […]

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You’ll Never Work In this Town Again!

Surely you’ve heard about that million dollar lawsuit against Amazon filed by an anonymous actress who claims that Internet Movie Database (which is owned by Amazon) damaged her ability to get work because it published her age.  According to the Daily Dot, the lawsuit claimed: “If one is perceived to be ‘over-the-hill,’ i.e., approaching 40, […]

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Is Wanting to Look Good Anti-Feminist?

If a feminist worries over her worry lines, frets over getting fat, or lusts after lipstick… but there’s no one around to witness it, can she still call herself a feminist? They’re questions we all ponder at one time or another, I suppose. Is buying Spanx buying into an oppressive ideal? Does dabbling in fillers […]

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In The News

Here’s a select list of some of the buzz Undecided has generated: PRINT: Psychologies, July 7, 2014: “How to Make a U-Turn” Comstock’s Magazine, March 2012: “Feel the Burn” Santa Clara Magazine, January 2012: “Future Imperfect” The Weekly Herald, December 8, 2011: “Best of 2011: Business, society, science & God” Daily Mail, November 29, 2011: […]

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The Birthday Myth

This Saturday is my birthday. And while I’ve never been one to turn down a celebration–whether said celebration takes the form of wine, food (specifically the three-course tasting menu at Julienne), or a jump out of a perfectly good airplane–the past couple of years have seen me less and less inclined to announce my birthday. […]

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The Fix is In: F-words Galore.

As F-words go, Fix might be one of the ugliest.  As in, if your life measures low on the perfection scale, just go for the fix.  Change the externals.  Happiness to follow. It’s enough to make you drop an F-bomb of an entirely different sort. This all came to mind Wednesday when our morning paper […]

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Man Up? Man Down! News of the End of Men Has Been Greatly Exaggerated

Oh, how I tire of the End of Men headlines. Two recent books have reignited the conversation, though, as their titles indicate, they come at it from decidedly different perspectives. In “Manning Up,” Kay Hymowitz argues that men taking longer to grow up and get married (which are, you know, boogeyman-bad phenomena) is a problem […]

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Backlash bedamned: Fear not the alpha gals

Successful women, watch out.  The menfolk, they don’t like us. At least that’s the message from a New York Times piece by Katrin Bennhold, titled “Keeping Romance Alive in the Age of Female Empowerment”.  And since we’re all, you know, successful women, we thought we ought to parse it out if only to share the […]

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